© Mark Ollig
On May 14, 1973, NASA launched a modified Saturn V rocket carrying America’s first earth-orbiting space station called Skylab.
Let us pause and travel back 104 years before this launch took place.
In 1869, American author Edward Everett Hale wrote a story about a hand-built artificial moon orbiting the earth with people inside its enclosed sphere (think space station).
“The Brick Moon,” is the title of Hale's fictional account of constructing and launching into earth orbit a 200-foot diameter sphere structure large enough to live in.
Hale's artificial moon needed to be strong, and he chose to construct an enormous sphere of brick.
He reasoned the sphere required hardened material to survive the heat of air friction resulting from its ascent through the atmosphere and into an orbit around the earth.
Protective tiles or “bricks” used on a NASA Space Shuttle absorbed and deflected heat, so his reasoning could be considered futuristic.
“The interior of the Brick Moon is not solid brick, but rather a hollow space through which smaller hollow brick spheres are arrayed and interconnected,” Hale wrote.
The possibility of placing such a heavy brick sphere into earth orbit was thought impossible at that time due to the absence of a suitable launch platform.
Looking back, America did launch its first crewed hydrogen gas balloon flight into the sky on Jan. 9, 1793, from Philadelphia, PA.
However, sending an artificial satellite or brick moon into space in 1869 required a different method.
Hale wrote this story before the emergence of modern rocketry, which wouldn't be seen for another 57 years, when, on March 16, 1926, Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket.
Hale needed to devise some clever way to move a large brick moon spherical structure off the ground.
A push would send the round brick moon rolling down a slope towards two massive water-powered flywheels.
These flywheels will have stored enough water pressure energy that once the brick moon comes into contact with the edges of both flywheels, it would roll onto a wooden ramp directed upwards and travel at lightning speed into space.
Hale uses the analogy of a “gigantic peashooter” to describe this method of launching the brick moon high into the sky and with enough speed to travel halfway around the earth so that as it descended, it would rotate (orbit) around the planet forever.
He writes that the brick moon (now a space station) was “nearly the orbit of our original plan, nine thousand miles from the earth's center, five thousand from the surface.”
As the brick moon orbited the earth in 1869, its thirty-seven-member crew communicated using Morse code telegraphy with people on the ground.
Another famous science fiction writer, Jules Verne, wrote the book “From Earth to the Moon” in 1865. In it, he writes about a projectile (space rocket) with three people aboard, launched from a cannon and landing on the moon.
The Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon 104 years after Verne’s tale about going there.
Verne's cannon launcher was named Columbiad; the Apollo 11 command module was named Columbia. As Verne's did, Apollo 11 had a three-person crew, and both rockets launched from Florida.
Hale and Verne wrote their stories long before anyone had developed a practical means of space travel.
NASA’s Skylab was an 85-ton, 82-foot long (without a command module attached) spacecraft manufactured by McDonnell Douglas from an empty Saturn V rocket third stage.
The Skylab space station was designed for people to live and work in for long periods while orbiting the earth. The living quarters included all the comforts of a three-bedroom home.
The space station traveled at 17,500 mph, circling the earth every 90 minutes at an average altitude of 272 miles above the planet.
Attached to Skylab were two solar arrays providing 12,400 watts of power.
The NASA website reveals Skylab was equipped with a second command module docking port.
If the existing Skylab crew’s docked command module encountered a major malfunction, “Ah, Houston, we’ve had a problem,” a second Apollo command module spacecraft carrying two astronauts would be launched and come to their rescue. All five astronauts would then return to earth in the second command module.
The first crewed mission to Skylab began on May 25, 1973, with the launch of a Saturn 1B rocket containing astronauts Captain Charles “Pete” Conrad, Jr., Commander Joseph P. Kerwin, and Commander Paul J. Weitz.
Until Feb. 8, 1974, Skylab was home to nine astronauts from three separate space flight launches.
All nine spent 171 days, 13 hours living there, performing four spacewalks and completing 300 scientific, biomedical, astronomical, and technical projects.
On July 11, 1979, The non-functioning Skylab space station’s orbit decayed and re-entered the earth’s atmosphere, disintegrating and scattering debris in the Indian Ocean and near Perth, Australia.
Edward Everett Hale was born in Boston, MA, on April 3, 1822, and died in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston on June 10, 1909, at 87.
“The Brick Moon,” written 153 years ago, is the first fictional story of an artificial satellite with a crew onboard orbiting the earth.
